When I try to copy a large dir ~75GB from an NFS server to my downloads folder, the system quickly grinds to a halt. Apps start slowing down and freezing, animations freeze, and eventually the whole display freezes and touching the keyboard or mouse does nothing so I have to hard reset the computer. …

What does top show is happen to CPU usage? Is the system logging anything while the transfer is happening? You could run sudo journalctl --follow Then do the transfer to see if there is anything interesting reported.

Hi, I think I found the problem. I think it could simply be the fact that I was transferring many small files on a LUKS encrypted BTRFS volume on a Crucial P3. Not a good combination for a DRAM-less SSD I suspect.

[image] Nikolai Patrick: a DRAM-less SSD There it is. . . That’s surely going to go to a snail’s crawl after the first 6GB are through.

[image] Nikolai Patrick: Not a good combination for a DRAM-less SSD I suspect. In comparison the Samsung EVO 980 that I have in my system has 2GiB of dram. The other thing you need to care about with SSDs is the “endurance” of the drive expressed in TiB written. Cheap drives will have a low …

Btrfs aggressively delays allocation, accumulating small writes into sequential writes, and also will inline very small data extents (around 4KiB or less, I think) into the metadata leaf, which is 16KiB by default. I would try another IO scheduler, but only expect modest improvement. BFQ potentiall…

See BFQ, Multiqueue-Deadline, or Kyber? Performance Characterization of Linux Storage Schedulers in the NVMe Era . A key finding is: “(iii) Kyber and BFQ can deliver 99.3% lower P99 latency than None or MQ-Deadline schedulers in the presence of multiple interfering workloads.” For this specific ca…

Fedora 44 grinds to a halt when copying large files off an NFS server

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tk2345 (T K) July 11, 2026, 6:29am 4

The writes from the copy starve the requests from the rest of the system.

Fedora uses the “none” io scheduler by default for ssds. See Set the I/O scheduler based on file system type? - #8 by chrismurphy for selection of io scheduler.

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Fedora 44 grinds to a halt when copying large files off an NFS server

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